                “I would never put it in the power of any printer or publisher to suppress or alter a work of mine, by making him master of the copy”                    Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1792.                        “The printer dares not go beyond his licensed copy”                    Milton, Aeropagetica, 1644.                        
Since time immemorial, unauthorized use and outright piracy of audio and visual source material has caused lost revenues to the owners of such material, and has been a source of confusion and corruption of original work.
With the advent of digitizing data audio signals and images, the technology of copying materials and redistributing them in an unauthorized manner has reached new heights of sophistication, and more importantly, omnipresence. Lacking objective means for comparing an alleged copy of material with the original, owners and possible litigation proceedings are left with a subjective opinion of whether the alleged copy is stolen, or has been used in an unauthorized manner. Furthermore, there is no simple means of tracing a path to an original purchaser of the material, something which can be valuable in tracing where a possible “leak” of the material first occurred.
A variety of methods for protecting commercial material have been attempted. One is to scramble signals via an encoding method prior to distribution, and descramble prior to use. This technique, however, requires that both the original and later descrambled signals never leave closed and controlled networks, lest they be intercepted and recorded. Furthermore, this arrangement is of little use in the broad field of mass marketing audio and visual material, where even a few dollars extra cost causes a major reduction in market, and where the signal must eventually be descrambled to be perceived and thus can be easily recorded.
Another class of techniques relies on modification of source audio or video signals to include a subliminal identification signal, which can be sensed by electronic means. Examples of such systems are found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,972,471 and European patent publication EP 441,702, as well as in Komatsu et al, “Authentication System Using Concealed Image in Telematics,” Memoirs of the School of Science & Engineering, Waseda University, No. 52, p. 45–60 (1988) (Komatsu uses the term “digital watermark” for this technique). An elementary introduction to these methods is found in the article “Digital Signatures,” Byte Magazine, November, 1993, p. 309. These techniques have the common characteristic that deterministic signals with well defined patterns and sequences within the source material convey the identification information. For certain applications this is not a drawback. But in general, this is a highly inefficient form of embedding identification information for a variety of reasons: (a) the whole of the source material is not used; (b) deterministic patterns have a higher likelihood of being discovered and removed by a would-be infringer; and (c) the signals are not generally ‘holographic’ in that identifications may be difficult to make given only sections of the whole. (‘Holographic’ is used herein to refer to the property that the identification information is distributed globally throughout the coded signal, and can be fully discerned from an examination of even a fraction of the coded signal. Coding of this type is sometimes termed “distributed” herein.)
What is needed is a reliable and efficient method for performing a positive identification between a copy of an original signal and the original. This method should not only be able to perform positive identification, it should also be able to relate version identification of sold copies in order to better pinpoint the point of sale. The method should not compromise the innate quality of material which is being sold, as does the placement of localized logos on images. The method should be robust so that an identification can be made even after multiple copies have been made and/or compression and decompression of the signal has taken place. The identification method should be largely uneraseable or “uncrackable.” The method should be capable of working even on fractional pieces of the original signal, such as a 10 second “riff” of an audio signal or the “clipped and pasted” sub-section of an original image.
The existence of such a method would have profound consequences on audio and image piracy in that it could (a) cost effectively monitor for unauthorized uses of material and perform “quick checks”; (b) become a deterrent to unauthorized uses when the method is known to be in use and the consequences well publicized; and (c) provide unequivocal proof of identity, similar to fingerprint identification, in litigation, with potentially more reliability than that of fingerprinting.
In accordance with an exemplary embodiment of the invention, a computer system is provided with associated means for manipulating either digital audio signals or digital images. In cases where original material is in “non-digital” form, such as on audio tape or on a photograph, means for creating a high fidelity digital copy of the material is included in the illustrative embodiment. This physical system will be referred to as the “Eye-D” workstation or system which serves as a concise trade name. The Eye-D system embeds an imperceptible global signal either directly onto the digital original or onto the “digitized copy” of the original if it was in a non-digital form to begin with. The new copy with the embedded signal becomes the material which is sold while the original is secured in a safe place. The new copy will be nearly identical to the original except under the finest of scrutiny; thus, its commercial value will not be compromised. After the new copy has been sold and distributed and potentially distorted by multiple copies, the present disclosure details a method for positively identifying any suspect signal against the original.
One embodiment uses identification signals which are global (holographic) and which mimic natural noise sources. This approach allows the maximization of identification signal energy as opposed to merely having it present ‘somewhere in the original material.’ This allows it to be much more robust in the face of thousands of real world degradation processes and material transformations such as cutting and cropping of imagery.
The foregoing and additional features and advantages will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description thereof, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.